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Tag: worship

I awoke this morning to a palpable depression in the energy around me. I didn’t need to interact with anyone to feel it. So many around me were sad, grieving the loss of someone…or something. Things weren’t any better when I went to class this afternoon. Our professor was so depressed he couldn’t teach, and so our class spent twenty-five minutes talking about the election.

As I sat observing and meditating on what I was seeing, I realized that people were literally feeling as though someone had died. Even my family snapped at me when I reminded them that I saw Trump’s victory coming back in August. (Please know that I didn’t care who won, but I know human nature enough to know well in advance who would. More on that another time.)

When you hear the word worship, what comes to mind? Do you picture a cantor and a hymnal? Or perhaps an organ? Maybe you picture a hearty Gospel choir, clapping and singing with such deep and resonant tones that heaven’s angels get a little jealous. Or perhaps it’s the sensation of heart-pounding drumbeats in a dimly lit room, interspersed with brightly-lit LEDs and the distorted melodies of an electric guitar.

Perhaps for you, worship has nothing to do with music. Perhaps for you, worship brings to mind dancing, painting with water colors, or finishing that two-thousand-foot vertical ascent, only to be robbed of your breath by the view.

In the modern Church, worship has come to mean a lot of things for a lot of people. There’s just one problem: of all the things worship has come to mean for so many, none of them come close to encompassing what worship means in the Bible.